Can you tell me what happened to innocence

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Special Features. Submit a Case. Phillips filled his plate with chicken wings and barbecue ribs and mashed potatoes. There were lots of desserts, too, but Phillips wanted one in particular. Baumer went to the dessert station and asked for a bowl with two scoops of vanilla ice cream. She brought it back and set it down. Phillips brought the spoon to his mouth. She took him to Meijer, the cavernous supermarket, and watched him admiring the deep shelves of orange juice. Fresh-squeezed, with pulp, without pulp, Tropicana, Minute Maid, never from concentrate.

He must have spent an hour taking in the glory. Baumer knew this feeling, too, the deprivation of prison, the gradual rewiring of your brain, the sensory jolt of reentry to the outside world. For her it was soap and lotion, this weird craving while she was locked away, and she got out and went to Meijer and spent a long time inhaling the scent of berry shampoo.

Not to mention the second trial, if indeed the state intended to try Phillips again. These cases were exhausting, as David Moran had found at the Innocence Clinic. Again and again, Moran and his students would conclude that a convicted person was innocent. They would file a motion. And then, even when Moran had evidence he considered incontrovertible, Worthy and her prosecutors would argue from one appellate court to another to preserve the conviction.

The innocence lawyers had a term for this practice. They called it fighting to the death. Valerie Newman had fought Worthy to the death more than once. Newman had won about a dozen exonerations and a US Supreme Court case in her 25 years as a court-appointed appellate defense attorney. She represented Thomas and Raymond Highers, two brothers convicted of murder in , and persuaded a judge to grant them a new trial after new witnesses came forward.

Following the lead of other big-city district attorneys, Worthy was assembling a team of lawyers who looked for wrongful convictions and set the innocent free.

And she wanted to put Newman in charge. But Newman saw an opportunity. Her first assignment was the case of Richard Phillips. When they interviewed Richard Palombo, he finally named his accomplice in the robbery that first sent Phillips to prison.

It was Fred Mitchell. Newman wondered if this was the start of a pattern: Mitchell committing a crime, blaming it on Phillips, and getting away with it. Alex Harris said there was a hit on him in June , and he fled the state.

Something else was bothering Newman: the timeline Mitchell gave on the witness stand. Newman checked the prison records. Palombo was right.

Furthermore, Phillips could not have conspired with Palombo in June They met for the first time at a barbecue on July 4. The story Mitchell told at the trial could not have been true. On March 28, , after Newman and the judge signed an order dismissing the case against Phillips, Kym Worthy held a news conference. This time there were no caveats, no lingering doubts.

It was a complete exoneration. Nineteen months later, in the car on the way to see his friends, Richard Phillips is singing again. The song has no name, no words, but it is his personal anthem: a long, joyful note, resilient, unquenchable. He gets out of the car. A dog runs out to greet him. He has several adoptive families now, several homes in which he is always welcome, including this one, the home of Roz Gould Keith and Richard Keith.

He texted them the other night to say he loved them. Now he walks inside, and Mr. Keith gets him a glass of orange juice, and he sits back in an easy chair with Primrose the dog snuggled up to him, and he and the Keiths tell the story of the Richard Phillips Art Gallery.

He struggled for a while on the outside, unable to find a job, crashing with a guy he met in jail, overwhelmed by a world he barely recognized. Then he thought of the paintings.

He called Doreen Cromartie, his old pen pal in New York. Yes, she still had them. There were about paintings. A little boy walking on a sand dune. A bare-chested warrior gazing at an orange sky. All the places he could not go. He bought a bus ticket for New York to see the paintings and the woman who kept them. She had a suitcase full of his letters. They had been corresponding for 35 years. She thought she was in love with him, wondered if perhaps they could be together now in Rochester, but he needed his freedom and his old home.

He collected the paintings and shipped them back to Michigan. Phillips had met the Keiths through an old friend of theirs, his lawyer Gabi Silver. They owned a marketing company. Another innocence advocate, Zieva Konvisser, helped them arrange an art show in Ferndale.

The curator, Mark Burton, put about 50 paintings on display. Attendance was perhaps five times larger than usual: professors, politicians, even the judge who dismissed the case. Now he could pay his bills, could send Doreen Cromartie a check to thank her for making it all possible. He got a used Ford Fusion and learned to drive again. He spun around on the ice, went into a ditch, got back on the highway and kept driving.

Phillips says good-bye to the Keiths. Back in Southfield, he stops at the supermarket. He whistles a tune and saunters through the aisles, taking care to select low-sodium bacon. Also Hostess Donettes, glazed, which he says are not for him but actually for the deer who live in the woods behind his apartment. Then comes the orange juice: Tropicana Pure Premium, homestyle, some pulp, a sturdy jug with a satisfying handle.

At the register he pays in cash, pulling on the ends of a dollar bill to make a pleasant snapping noise. Back at the apartment, a modest walk-up with a security gate, his painting of sunflowers hangs in the dining room.

That one is not for sale. Phillips enjoys being in demand — enjoys the speaking engagements, the calls and texts from well-wishers, the invitations to visit friends — but this leaves him with little time to actually paint. He has no way of knowing that in five months or so, with the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, he will be forced back into solitude. And that in those long hours alone in his apartment, he will lose himself once again in the lonely joy of making art.

Now he turns on some jazz, heavy on the saxophone, and takes a slice of leftover pizza from the refrigerator. He pours some barbecue sauce on the pizza and takes a bite. The younger Richard Phillips is 50 years old. Father and son met at the zoo. Something irretrievable had been lost.

The son had learned how to paint, and in high school he won an award for his portrait of the actress Lisa Bonet, and his father had not been there to encourage him.

The Phillips family had been torn apart. No wrongful-imprisonment compensation would ever put it back together. You wear what you feel comfortable with. Rush hour in metro Detroit, the afternoon a darkening gray, Phillips singing again, percussion of the turn signal. He is asked if he ever imagined an alternate life, without Fred Mitchell, or the murder, or 46 years in prison. He lists the guys from the old crew. One died of AIDS, another overdosed on drugs, another had kidney failure, another got diabetes, foot amputated, leg amputated, dead, dead, dead.

Fred Mitchell, too—. The prison yard, The cold knife under his sleeve. Mitchell walking toward the Blind Spot. A debt payable in blood. A life for a life. Phillips felt dead already. Because you still might have a chance to get out of here. And so he let Mitchell go, and Mitchell drank himself to death at age 49, and Phillips stayed in his cell, painting his way to freedom.

He looked old when he came out of prison, blinking in the cold sunlight, but he got new clothes and dyed his hair, and he began to look younger, as if he had turned back time. Now he rides on the highway in the late afternoon, singing that song again: always old, forever new, the sound of wisdom and innocence. Richard Phillips was exonerated after spending more than four decades in prison.

Learn how to submit a claim of innocence to the California Innocence Project. There are more than 60 innocence organizations around the world. For help outside of Southern California, refer to the list of other innocence organizations in the United States and the world. The California Innocence Project does not handle civil cases, sentencing issues, or complaints regarding prison conditions.

For other services and groups that may assist in various legal matters, see our list of resources. I am very proud of the accomplishments we have achieved with all of these goals. We have brought home many innocent clients over the years and experienced the joy of reuniting them with their families. We have seen our law graduates go on to do great things.

And, we have participated in changing many laws that assist our work and improve the lives of our clients. We have also been involved in international cases, helping to free Jason Puracal from Nicaragua, Scott McMahon from the Philippines, and representing Grace and Matthew Huang in their wrongful incarceration case in Qatar.

Simple expenses like gas money for us to visit our clients in remote prisons, our phone bill so clients can call us from prison, and copies of transcripts and crime scene photos can add up.

I encourage you to explore our website and consider donating. Director , California Innocence Project. Members will be given monthly opportunities to develop their understanding of the criminal justice system while connecting with individuals with similar passions and interests. First Name. Last Name. Sign Up. Facebook Twitter. Not for very long, but we talked. I took several students a couple weeks ago, and we met him. Of course I always want to meet my clients and know my clients.

But oftentimes they know the least of anybody. You had also mentioned that Syed had not known about the physical evidence until Sarah Koenig told him about it. What was his reaction to hearing about that? I was not there: Sarah told him about the physical evidence. He thought he understood that she was murdered, and that was bad enough.

The specter that it might be something entirely different and more was stunning. And then of course he had to deal with the fact that once again this person who he trusted to defend him never even mentioned it. It does sound to me like Gutierrez did a lot and fought a lot. It also seems very clear to me that she was falling apart. I looked into MS and some of the symptoms, and the stress of getting halfway through the trial and getting a mistrial and starting again?

The stress would be really bad for you if you had MS. My biggest concern, though, is that there was physical evidence, and nobody tested it—not Maryland and not her.

And Adnan knew nothing about the physical evidence. I think I have shortened their time for them because I did already go and talk to the officer and get all the lab reports. I can tell them exactly where all the evidence is. Whether they join or not could determine how quickly we get results.

Could you just walk me through the alternate ways this will move forward, depending on whether the test results come back with a match or not?

And then we might hit on someone who is incarcerated and who has committed other crimes, like Moore—he was linked with DNA to a rape-murder and then to two rapes.